Why the Deliberate Focus on the Confederate Flag is Derailing the Real Conversation About Race in AmericaDo not adjust your screen. That is not the Confederate flag. In 1976, Black attorney Ted Landsmark was speared with the other red, white and blue flag in Boston. Racist rage over school desegregation and busing impaled Landsmark. These white Bostonians harbored anxieties similar to those attributed to suspected South Carolina killer Dylann Storm Roof. Both parties loathed the prospect of Black children being educated alongside whites and rejected nonviolence.
But no one blamed the Boston assault on Old Glory. The Confederate flag has been less fortunate.
After failures to indict the white killers of Eric Garner, Michael Brown Jr., John Crawford III and untold Black victims, the secessionist battle flag is a convicted racist. For the first time in history, a flagpole is under the bus.
Mitt Romney, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina State Rep. Doug Brannon and a host of “well-meaning” whites have made the Confederate flag an accomplice in the Mother Emanuel AME massacre. This insulting façade obscures the pathology of white culture, which guarantees the production of Dylan Storm Roofs and complementary white power paraphernalia.
To remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house would require walking past the monument to former governor, United States senator, co-founder of Clemson University and “anti-Black terrorist” Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman. Cynthia R. Greenlee describes Tillman as one of Roof’s “spiritual ancestors,” who was equally unhinged about the prospect of “Black men and white women in ‘sexual congress.’” In a 1909 speech, Tillman makes his views crystal clear, pledging support for “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”
...Jack Townes is a Selma native, 21, and Black. After discovering the namesake of the bridge, Townes and a group of activists labored to rename the structure.
Pardon the redundancy.
They failed. Edmund Pettus Bridge remains because the manifesto attributed to Roof states correctly that, “Blacks are subconsciously viewed by white people [as] lower beings.” Which necessitates a world dedicated to white supremacy. It’s insulting to reduce a concept that has ruled and contaminated this planet for centuries to a 21-year-old white boy and a glorified stitch of cloth.
North Carolina NAACP President the Rev. Dr. William Barber denounced the Confederate flag as vulgar, but added that, “To suggest… taking a symbol down is sufficient to honor nine deaths… is to diminish those lives.” The Rev. Barber recognizes 2015 anti-Black policies and practices that are far more hazardous than Civil War memorabilia. Discarding the Confederate flag leaves contemporary mechanisms of racism intact.
Flags don’t produce racism. White thoughts, speech and actions nourish and maintain white power. The removal of apartheid statues and “whites only” signs demonstrates that white people can efficiently preserve the systemic exploitation of Black people without blatant markers. It’s unlikely a South Carolina void of Confederate flags would have preserved and valued the lives of shooting victim Walter Scott or the Emanuel 9.
Dylann Roof is not a Confederate killer. He and Chris Kyle are American snipers, the most recent generation of white killers. At minimum, this tragedy should permanently clarify our grasp of white pathology and heighten our suspicion of all white folks. Even, those like Kyle, who insist that, “Americans [respect] houses of worship as sacred and therefore [are] reluctant to attack there.”
Gus T. Renegade is the host of The C.O.W.S. Talk Radio – a platform designed to dissect and counter racism. He has interviewed and researched authors, filmmakers and scholars from around the globe.